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Misc

In this post, we’re going to consider representing the classic C string in Whiley. This turns out to be useful as we can then try to verify properties about functions which operate on C strings (e.g. strlen(), strcpy(), etc). If you’re not familiar with C strings, then the main points are:

A couple of weeks back, I gave a presentation to the Wellington Java User Group. The talk provides a useful introduction to verifying software in Whiley, and shows a bunch of interesting examples. Anyway, you can see the presentation here:

We’ve started using Whiley again in my second year course Formal Foundations of Programming. The aim of this course is to introduce students into a range of techniques related to software correctness. So far, we’ve looked at some static analysis and model checking tools.

The next version of Whiley is upon us. Whilst predictably late, this release packs quite a punch and contains a range of changes to the language syntax, and critical updates to the verifier. Certainly, this version is capable of verifying more programs than any previous version. The summary of changes includes:

Finally, a release of Whiley that is on schedule! This includes some fairly significant updates to the syntax of the language itself:

Removal of set and map data types (#471). These data types have been entirely removed from both the source language (Whiley), and the bytecode language (WyIL). This is a pretty radical change, . . . → Read More: Whiley v0.3.35 Released!

Finally, after almost two months of effort, the next version of Whiley is released. This release has taken a long time, not because it contains so much, but simply because I have been truly busy with teaching my second year paper SWEN221. Nevertheless, this release does contain some interesting additions:

The next release of Whiley is upon us!! Work got a little bogged down with the start of term, but should hopefully now pick up a little. The main component of this release is the removal of the string and char data types from the language. This is quite a big change, but is . . . → Read More: Whiley v0.3.33 Released!

Well, it is with some trepidation that I have released the next version of Whiley. This incorporates a very large number of changes and, unfortunately, should be considered extremely unstable at this time (at least, from the perspective of verification). In particular, the main list of changes includes:

One my goals for Whiley in 2015 is to focus more on embedded systems (see here for more). A recent project of ours was compiling Whiley code to run on a QuadCopter and this identified several challenges here. In particular, Whiley does not provide good memory management for such resource constrained environments. My plan . . . → Read More: My ATtiny85 Games Console

It’s scary to think that 2014 has been and gone, and that I still haven’t released the next major version of Whiley! Despite this, I have been busy improving the compiler and language and I thought it would be helpful for me to recap what was achieved last year, and what the goals going . . . → Read More: Looking Forward to 2015